The Cotton Plantation Remembered: An Egyptian Family Story

CHAPTER ONE

Therapeutic

Photography

Hommage à l’errance, aux revenants invisibles, qui me hantent et me poursuivent, en espérant que l’écriture apaisera leurs solitudes et la mienne …

(Homage to the wandering, invisible ghosts that haunt me and follow me; hoping that writing will soothe their loneliness and mine …)

I would like to start with two quotations from a favorite work of Susan Sontag, On Photography, that will tell much about my personal relationship with this medium. The two following quotes were a disturbing and yet genuine revelation to me. In fact, they confronted me with my unconscious doings with the camera:

There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.¹

Photography extends the eighteenth-century literati’s discovery of the beauty of ruins into a genuinely popular taste. And it extends that beauty beyond the romantics’ ruins, such as those glamorous forms of decrepitude photographed by Laughlin, to the modernists’ ruins—reality itself. The photographer is willy-nilly engaged in the enterprise of antiquating reality, and photographs are themselves instant antiques.²

It all began after my mother passed away, some seven years ago, when I was desperately trying to communicate with the imagined ghosts haunting the house of this estate. I was trying with my camera to seize my mother’s spirit in a vain attempt to communicate with her.

Photography turned into a serious exercise of mourning all the members of my family who passed away during the previous decade. It became a sort of a therapy that helped me to overcome death. I was trying with my camera to capture the ghosts to compensate for my sense of loss. I was searching for invisible visitors who might appear in photographs. At the start, I mainly took photographs in sepia. These certainly conveyed the feeling of ruin and decadence that I strongly felt in this collapsing ‘house of the spirits.’ The photographs of the inside of the house turned out, time and again, to be unconsciously devoid of human beings. These lonely interior pictures then contrasted with the lively and densely populated contemporary village life. I unconsciously started to use black and white when I was photographing the inside space of the da’ira (estate),³ while I became increasingly fascinated by the movement and joy of peasants when they were collectively working in the fields. Also unconsciously, I found myself photographing the peasants in color in an attempt to capture the vividness of the green fields and the earth.

Photography then turned into a passion and a process of learning what I could do with the mistakes and the endless variables in playing with a technology which, I have to confess, I did not really master. The process more than the outcome itself—the process of learning through photographing—was one way of attempting a reconciliation with those who had departed. As if I was trying to catch an entire bygone era. Nostalgia, as we all know, has to do with a sense of loss that is very often accompanied by the embellishment, if not the reinvention, of a nonexistent past, coinciding with the reimagining of spaces. But isn’t photography the medium par excellence for invoking nostalgia by creating a world of pathos, as Susan Sontag has told us?

Nevertheless, I tried to avoid the traps of nostalgia by convincing myself that my training as a sociologist, concerned with social inequalities and injustice, ought to be a good reason for providing a meaning for my actions. But then I found myself struggling on various levels. I was intersecting between the visual and the text. Between exposing a personal history through revealing family documents that were rich with evidence regarding the harsh conditions of exploitation, and a personal psychological barrier in trying to come to terms with an authoritarian, patriarchal grandfather who was certainly the least progressive figure of his time. And, last but not least, acknowledging a violent and often bleak past for the subalterns who distanced themselves in natural self-protection. Indeed, I needed time, tact, psychological skills, and further inventive ways to evoke the past in order to allow the older peasants to open up to me with narratives of their memories.

The Village and Me

In the early eighties, when I persistently took pictures of the village, I can vividly recall that the peasants often said, Why are you photographing us? We are poor and destitute … you will be showing these pictures to Europeans, and they will make fun of our poverty. Time and again Susan Sontag’s sentence There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera perfectly described the voyeurism and violence in my act of photographing.

My only consolation, I then thought, was to try and reciprocate at least by giving back to the villagers the pictures I took of them. Little by little, this gesture turned into a ritual, and in time it became a serious duty toward them. Upon each visit to the village, more photographs were requested by the villagers. More and more people urged me to photograph them in portrait poses, wearing their best clothes.

Planting rice, June 2009.

Some three decades elapsed and the village drastically changed. Electricity came in 1982. It was naturally followed by tape recorders, televisions, washing machines, blenders—and many cars and taxis. Such innovations were soon followed by the introduction of satellite dishes, computers, tuk tuks (the agile, three-wheeled vehicles with two passenger seats, imported from India), and the like. New generations grew up with different consumerist desires. Today, there are a few men and women who hold university degrees. These younger women and men are innocent, or freer than their parents, of the memories of humiliation and fear experienced by their elders not only under feudalism, but even under the revolutionary regime of Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser. The terror that emanated from the spaces of such old estates slowly withered away with the diminishing size of the land owned by former landowners. The rigid hierarchical system collapsed, while other constellations of emerging local mafias, such as Islamists and dubious Islamic bankers (like Ashraf al-Saad in the late eighties, who ended up in jail after a trial for fraud)—coinciding with the rising power of corrupt police officers—were to be witnessed in the countryside. Many peasants departed from the land to work in the city, or left the country as migrants to Iraq and the Gulf.

They were no longer dependent on the estate for survival. The village witnessed a form of urbanization that made it look increasingly like the slums of Cairo. And—most importantly to me—my family lost power and status, which made my life much easier as a potential ethnographer.

Then, digital cameras made their appearance in the village. Simultaneously, the peasants took a liking to recording their weddings and feasts on video, to feel the equals of the urban Cairenes. They took a genuine liking to photography, so much so that today photograph albums, in particular wedding albums, are displayed to and contemplated by all guests in nearly every living room in the village.

For some three years now, almost all the pictures I have taken in the village have been immediately downloaded onto two computers belonging to villagers via my USB stick. CDs are then reproduced for anyone requesting them. Paradoxically, the most powerful bond that has strengthened my relationship with the villagers has turned out to be the very photographs some of them dreaded three decades earlier. Since then, hundreds of people from the village have asked me to make their portraits, which I have done. I was later asked by two villagers who owned computers if they could download my own family albums, together with the scanned pictures of the thirties that I found in the house. I wondered why this would be of interest to them. I noticed that those who asked for my personal photograph albums were the younger generation, educated schoolteachers and technicians, who had practically no memory of what a cotton estate really was. They were exempt from that trauma.

As several of the villagers have been working closely with me, and as I have been documenting the histories of the older generation of peasants, all these elements, I guess, were reasons for arousing the curiosity of the younger villagers. They wanted to be partners in the process of recording the memory.

Skyping with ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, Shaykh Zakariya’s son.

I started recently to Skype with the few villagers who owned computers. Clearly the velocity of communication has had an unprecedented impact on all of us. True, we have all become globalized, but class disparities remain flagrant. Though Skype has been introduced into the village, and photography has been democratized, a proper sewerage system is still lacking,⁴ in spite of the remarkable efforts exerted by the older villagers to push for the installation of the network. All waste and dirty water ends up in the canals that irrigate the land, which explains why so many people suffer from liver and kidney problems. But the war between the villagers and the corrupt employees of the municipality seems to be fierce and endless. It is clear to me that not only will class always separate me from them, but so will quality of life and the fact that they have so little control over their destiny.

Again, it might be that in my endeavors, I will be caught up in a useless, self-reflexive struggle, revealing much more about myself and my own class tribulations and guilt feelings than about the real life of the peasants. Is it nostalgia, time and again, that I am flirting with? Is this not exactly what Pierre Bourdieu was accused of when he returned to do ethnographic research in his native village in the Béarn, after having spent some four years in Algeria?⁵ Obviously then, nostalgia, class concerns, and self-reflexivity seem to be intricate, unavoidable issues in our profession. But what counted most for Bourdieu was how sociology should help in analyzing one’s own experience: One must undertake reflexive analysis … to socioanalyze one’s own experience … The sociologists must make their own sociologies … their own socioanalysis … The work of research is a work of socioanalysis.⁶

However, I visited the countryside only on holidays, while Bourdieu grew up in rural Béarn in the French Pyrenees, and came from a modest background—his father was a postman of peasant origin. The single men he interviewed in his ethnography were in fact his schoolmates, who grew up with him in the village. There is no comparison with my class origin, because as my grandfather grew older he turned into an absentee landowner. We went to the ‘izba (large estate) only for holidays, and my family looked down upon its peasants as mere servants—to be disciplined, because peasants were by nature sly, dirty, and liars. In other words, although my ancestors were all of fellaheen origin, I grew up with the waswasa (compulsive obsessions about cleanliness, so typical of the Turkish–Circassian class) of a so-called Turkish grandmother, who utterly despised anything associated with the fellaheen culture from which my grandfather originated. To put it bluntly, her racism was more than disturbing, and yet it was my grandfather who was the actual breadwinner. I guess this schism, epitomized in the boasting of an exaggerated ‘Turkishness’ on her side, versus (in her view) the low fellaheen origin on my grandfather’s, can explain my longstanding suspicion of insanity running through several members of the family.

This said, another obsession haunted and still haunts me. My iconic photographers, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Sebastião Salgado, said it all through the image, with the art of conveying the most wonderful feelings and aesthetic ideals without words. In a way, trying to reconcile images with text is an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable. My perpetual fear and unresolved insecurity still remain. It may be that my texts will eventually colonize the photographs. It may also be that they will spoil the photography—or that my photographs are simply uninteresting. I know there is no real answer to these fears. What perhaps appeased my angst a little were Pierre Bourdieu’s wonderful photographs of his early ethnography of Algeria in the fifties, which, strangely enough, were published in French and German just before he passed away.⁷ It was both comforting and rewarding to read about his experience with photography. For Bourdieu, it turned out to be a crucial instrument that helped him recall and reconstitute places, contexts, and people in the condition of complete strangeness that all of us experience at the start of our fieldwork. Bourdieu took thousands of photographs at a time when Algeria was experiencing a war and a harsh struggle for national liberation. Again and again he reminds us that photography’s power is similar to tape recording, because it allows us to listen endlessly to the same interview, endlessly discover here and there a subtlety of the language, and reminds us of a forgotten detail, a joke, or simply the way stories and events are expressed, revealing an entire cultural frame and world view. Simply said, photography allows us time to meditate. Nevertheless, for both Bourdieu and Sontag, photography is equally the manifestation of the distance of the observer, while creating an intimacy and trust. Bourdieu confessed, regretfully, that he could not keep a diary during his fieldwork because he hardly had time to do so. He traveled tirelessly, following the workers and peasants, and he ended up working very hard—exactly as they did. Bourdieu comforted me because his documentary photographs are far from being devoid of an aesthetic value. He, too, wanted for a long time to publish these photographs accompanied with texts, which he finally did. From him, I have learned that it is often the process of playing—or rather, of flirting—with the images and the words that is most important, more than the outcome, and this is what will keep me going for a while.

Photographs taken during the seasonal ‘black cloud’ of pollution, allegedly formed by the burning of rice chaff.

Vignette

The Living Memory of the ‘Izba

—Shaykh Zakariya ‘Abd al-‘Aziz

As well as finally becoming the manager of our land, Zakariya developed, as the years went by, a very strong relationship of trust and friendship with my mother. When my mother inherited her father’s land in the early seventies, she was immediately drawn to him, mainly because of his independent and honest character. In his youth, he won a reputation in the village for speaking out against the injustices of the wakil, the bash-katibs, and above all, the beh, who ruled without being present. Mother often said she had to get Zakariya on her side by first listening carefully to his complaints and to his advice; more so, by showing respect for what he represented. Obviously as a poor child of the da’ira, motherless since the age of twelve, he had strong grievances and a history of much suffering experienced for many years.

Shaykh Zakariya, 2012.

Unlike the previous managers and bash-katibs of the da’ira, Zakariya had in various situations alerted my mother to several corrupt practices that were perpetrated by the overseers. This is why, by the late eighties, he became the most important person in the ‘izba. Anyone, on first meeting him, would immediately be captivated by his brightness, articulateness, and his witty sense of humor. A reliable problem-solver who has never broken his word to anyone in the village, he has become one of its most venerable and respected inhabitants. His critical mind and love of the Arabic language have given him the status of village shaykh; he is the arbitrator when fights occur, and has intervened in several vendettas.

Something bound him immediately to my mother. For a start, he was the best gardener she had ever known, and she loved gardening. It is possible to describe Zakariya as a self-made man; he developed a genuine passion for trees, plants, and flowers, and by dint of hard work, and the conviction that land would always be a goldmine and should never be sold, he acquired ever more economic and symbolic capital in the village. Although he spent only a few years in school, he could read from a very early age. From the age of seven he worked in a garden. There he was trained by experienced gardeners, and set himself to master the Latin names of hundreds of plants.

Shaykh Zakariya in the cotton fields, early 1980s.

His mathematical disposition and sharpness of mind have stood him in good stead; for over the years he has managed to buy land, plus his share of the ‘tenancy land,’ and today he owns property amounting to some three feddan and six qirat, making him one of the largest landowners in the village. This began three decades ago during the late nineties, when a massive urge for cash among the small landowners caused them to sell their tiny plots. Zakariya, however, instead of purchasing a vehicle, invested as peasants traditionally did, in more water buffaloes. (He even shared a couple of them with my mother, and provided her with milk and fetir—a sort of puff pastry eaten for breakfast with honey and cream—whenever she was in the village.) The animals multiplied and provided him with more cash. With the surplus he made, together with my mother’s help, he purchased a tractor, which he rents out, driven by his son, to the entire village in return for payment. For this he employs his own bookkeeping system. The notebook never leaves him, and in case of any misunderstanding Zakariya takes it instantly out of his pocket, in the field or anywhere. For each customer he has